Castle Walls
by twowritehands
Summary: He's under gone several changes in your head: Castle, your favorite author, that annoying shadow, a friend, your funny sidekick, your loyal partner, your best friend, Rick.


**A/N:**_ our first Castle fic! This is a little teaser written right after the premier of Knockdown, so please ignore all that happens in Canon post that episode. (We have a minor beef with those plot lines, anyway.)_

**You are Det. Kate Beckett**

He's under gone several changes in your head: Castle, your favorite author, that annoying shadow, a friend, your funny sidekick, your loyal partner, your best friend, Rick.

You had already realized that your favorite part of an investigation was calling him, finding him in various moods. Sometimes he'd be playful, sometimes arrogant, or maybe you'll hear sleep in his voice, or panic, but more often than not he would answer your call inappropriately excited. (You don't know why, but something about that always cut the tension that was already built up inside of you from the moment you heard of the murder. The way he handles death so casually reminds you that it's a job, it's nothing personal and that your irrational dread of walking onto the scene to find your mother is completely impossible.)

Then he would come swaggering onto the crime scene with a coffee for you. (You always trust him to bring you one and so stopped buying them yourself a long time ago.) Clean-shaven, well dressed, but with his hair looking unruly and his eyes ablaze over that impish smile, he would be full of energy and wit and as devilishly handsome as always.

And maybe you read that sex scene in Heat Wave more times than you'll ever admit to so that you always feel aflutter the first time you see him of a day.

But so what. You could handle that. Hide from that. Be superior to that. To survive in a men's profession, you have to be hard and above things like that.

But then he found you some very strong, solid leads on your mom's case, helping you in a way that you couldn't even help yourself and then he stayed by your side as you teetered, once again, on that dangerous abyss between healthy and obsessed. He dedicated an entire book to you. He saved your life. He went and showed that he _can_ be a grown up, and a damn good one with a world's Most Loving Father badge besides.

These things you find it harder to hide from, but you manage it. You handle them with the expertise of a woman well trained in the art of living in dangerous proximity to a sharp and deadly weapon; any wounds are purely accidental, and they are never deeper than the skin.

You refuse to care when he sleeps around. You try to sleep around yourself, but you never got the hang of how to do that, anyway. You finally managed to find an interesting man in Joe-Biker-Surgeon and you do well at keeping him interested, and yourself distracted, though you won't see it that way. Even when he goes off to Africa to save the world and it becomes painfully obvious that his only purpose was to distract you from someone else.

And then that someone else kissed you.

A part of you hates him for it. Another part can never hate him no matter what he does, and yet another part lost all sense of up, down and sideways when his mouth covered yours, and all it wants is to be kissed like that again.

But questions burn through your mind. Had it been real, or just a means to an end? Maybe part of it had been real, and another just a part of the act… but which part was which?

And dammit, you know that these questions are just a smoke screen because you know the answers to them already; that kiss is with you as you try to fall asleep.

Are you?—

No. You can't be. No. There cannot be love where there is not a whole heart, and your heart lost some pretty big pieces when Mom died. Trying to love will only end in disaster. You learned this lesson the hard way a long time ago with Joe-Washington-Cupcake-Sprinkles. You couldn't love him completely and so he left you for a better job. You swore through the tears following his departure that you wouldn't kid yourself anymore; and since then you have learned to live with half a heart missing.

But hasn't it?—

No. It hasn't _grown back_. It can't. Not until justice is served.

_That was amazing!_ The memory of his breathless voice reminds you of soft firm lips and strong arms around you. You can't help it and carelessly let the sharp weapon get too close. You feel the sting again and again as you slip away into the sweetness. He tasted like cinnamon coffee. He kissed you with eager passion. He made you feel wanted. Important. Special. You forgot the damp night around you, the dangerous man standing nearby, the two good men possibly dead waiting for you to rescue them. You even forgot you weren't whole.

That one slices far too deep.

You sit up in bed, turn on the light, slam a fist into the comforter with a growl.

Infatuation. That's the word for it. The _only_ word for it. It's been weeks since you've been with Joe-Motorcycle. After facing so much trauma and near-death experiences, it's only natural you want to be held. And because your friend was the last man to touch you, it's only natural you should think of him. Infatuation. That's all it is. _Infatuation_.

So what. Big deal. No one cares. You'll just stand in line with half the other women in New York City. It would be a much shorter line to assemble those who _aren't_ infatuated. You get out of bed, mix a cup of hot chocolate, and pick up the phone to call Africa.

**You are Rick Castle**

It started like all the others. She was just another sexy woman standing near you while you were flirty and fun, hiding the real you deep down where only Mother and Alexis are allowed to go… But she refused your offers, awed you with strength and determination, and intrigued you with mystery peeking from behind walls thicker than yours. Doing the only thing you could do while mired down in writer's block, you wrote about what interested you; Her. And some of your best work came out of it.

After that maybe it was one part addiction to the thrill of catching killers, and one part a writer's superstition to keep feeding the muse, but you stuck around. Eventually you just couldn't leave. Because you cared.

You found a home in the 12th. You hadn't seen the same people on a day-to-day basis since you were in school. The friendships you have here mean more than any you've made since graduating. You feel useful. You have never before felt so much like a grown up and yet had so much fun at the same time. What's more, you've never had a beautiful woman go so long in your company without sleeping with you; It's refreshing, given you a new prospective on life. Not to mention, a long-term goal to work towards.

Because, oh yes, you _are_ going to sleep with her someday, and you're not talking about on the page, either.

Right from the beginning, you thought of her more than was healthy, had to if you were going to write Nikki Heat with any kind of substance. Long legs, heels and street-savvy sarcasm has been in your head during work time, free time, morning, and night time for three years now. It came as no surprise when you began to _care_; with a heart as big as yours, you were long used to caring, and so overlooked it with ease.

But these days you care more than you know is instinctively wise; you'll get yourself _killed_. That would leave Alexis fatherless, Mother shattered, the world without any hope for the perfect crime beautifully written into a mystery novel… but you'll have died for her.

You can't find it in yourself to be sorry about that.

You hadn't planned to kiss her. (Okay, you had; You had been planning to kiss her since you met her. The plan, though, had always been to catch her off guard and lay one of her, see if she could talk her way out of it. Always half conceived in the back of your head, kissing her was just meant to be a laugh... Kind of.) You _certainly_ never meant to kiss her like you did.

In the chilly damp night, with two friends in god-only-knows-what kind of condition waiting for you to rescue them, with an armed and dangerous man eyeballing you suspiciously, you couldn't let her pull her gun and get everyone killed. You acted on an impulse, grabbed her, brought the undercover role playing scenario to its natural—and somewhat precarious—climax; after all, two drunk, consenting adults wandering the streets have only once place to go, and a kiss is what gets them there.

But, god, how could one woman be so intoxicating?

She pulled out of the kiss when you got too intense and handsy. You hadn't even gotten your head all the way around what had happened when suddenly she was kissing you again.

You've been married twice and you never felt like this. It's not the usual thrill and rush from sex that you want—not entirely anyway. You still want that. But you aren't thinking about that. Because you want something more than that. And it's her.

Just her. And if this moment is all you'll ever get, you'll take it.

She broke the kiss again, but that time she did it to spin around and drop kick a two hundred pound man with a gun. At the time all you could think of was that that was sexy as hell (you had thought the moment to be everything in your wildest dreams, but then she topped it by being super assassin woman. It was _so cool_! Literally the only word to describe it was _amazing_.) But with hindsight, you feel a tinge of embarrassment; she broke the kiss to drop kick the guy because she still had her head in the game.

She's a professional. She probably never forgot where she was, what she was there to do. She wouldn't have forgotten about Ryan and Esposito waiting for your help, or that she had a boyfriend. You are embarrassed that you could, but you aren't embarrassed that you kissed her. You are a little bit sorry you later went Chuck Norris on the guy that tried to kill her. Not because he didn't deserve it, but because you broke two knuckles and it hurts.

You aren't sorry about the kiss. You tell yourself this too many times to count as you try to find sleep. You aren't sorry. If you hadn't kissed her, it might have been three more years before you knew _with this amount of certainty_ that you have found what you've been writing about, and looking for, and repeatedly talking yourself into believing you had when you really didn't. You have it now. No doubt.

It is simultaneously comforting and disturbing. You have been in _countless_ relationships where one party was in a different place, emotionally, than the other… but it was always _you _who was the one lagging behind while she went crazy with forever…

You have never been the one further along in the relationship, ready _before_ her to say love and marriage and—

It's scary as hell, and you don't like how emasculated it makes you feel and you don't know how to handle it so when your cell rings the very next morning, and you see _Beckett_ on the caller ID, you hit ignore and wince because you used the wrong hand and jarred a knuckle.

"Was that Beckett?" Alexis asks as she skips down the stairs, glossy red hair swinging and blue eyes lighting up your whole life.

"Yes." You answer, even though it will lead to questions, because you don't think you can lie about this. Like you knew she would, Alexis stops with her hand outstretched for the fridge door and frowns at you. "Passing up a murder? Dad, are you feeling okay?"

"I kissed Beckett." You say, might as well get to the heart of the problem. Alexis pops to her toes, those gorgeous eyes going round, and she flails her hands around. At the same time, a loud kind of squeal sounds off behind you—it's Mother, she had been listening in from the living room. She is descending on you in a matter of moments.

"How, when, why, and what was it like?" Alexis is asking.

Wow. Maybe you should have tried to lie about it. You can't talk about this with your teenaged daughter and your senior citizen mother.

But if you can't talk to them, who can you talk to?

The answer is the one person you are too afraid to talk to at the moment. Trapped, slightly panicked, you answer with the truth by default.

"Last night. Before—" You raise the bandaged hand. You already told them the story in minute detail—even acting some parts out—but had skipped over this part. Two of your favorite women in the world are peeved that you left it out the first time, but it had been too fresh and you hadn't worked out how you felt yet. You say as much. No one asks for details here—they have tact enough to know its private business. Alexis perches on a stool beside you and puts a cool hand on your arm. She isn't smiling.

"And now you're ignoring her calls. Oh, Daddy, please don't screw this up."

"Excuse me?" You ask.

"She's by _far_ the coolest person you've ever dated."

"We haven't been on a single date!" You retort, but Alexis cuts you off with a look far too fiery to be coming out of eyes so watery blue.

"What are you afraid of?"

The phone rings again. _Beckett_. You stare at it as it rings.

"Answer it!" your mother cries in a shrill voice. You shrug. "I'm busy."

Your mother wags a finger at you threateningly. "Kate is a smart girl, Richard. If you avoid her calls she's going to know it has everything to do with what happened last night and nothing to do with being busy. Answer it."

Normally, you obey your mother. But falling head over heels for your best friend/main character/woman with a gun has made you brave. Or cowardly.

You deliberately hit the ignore button, pocket the phone, and slip away into your office.

**You are Det. Kate Beckett**

You know why he isn't answering. You want to leave things as they are. Let him not answer. You could go days before seeing him again. It could do you some good. Except that doing that would imply that you have some reason to want avoid him in return. Which you don't.

When he fails to answer your third call, you head for his place. You have to see him, make things normal again. You can't move forward when things are so… up in the air between the two of you. If you can get him to talk to you, you can laugh it off, make excuses, slap him around until things are nicely back under the rug where they belong.

You take a deep breath before you knock on the door. It opens fast and Alexis is there with Martha over her shoulder. You know immediately from their expressions that they know. He came home and _talked _about it? Fire fills your gut before you know it. You don't know why, but it's not okay with you that he talked about it with other people before he talked about it with you.

It's your business. Yours and his. Not theirs.

"Is he here?" You ask and you sound pissed and they evidently expect you to be. They direct you to his office. You don't knock. He leaps to his feet, his desk chair spinning back and crashing into the wall.

"Kate!" He cries an octave higher than his usual sultry range. You smirk—it was almost like you caught him doing something private. His computer isn't on, and he's not writing or you would wonder if he was writing another sex scene. He must have just been thinking about one.

"Castle," You reply. You want to yell at him for telling Martha and Alexis about what happened, but you can't if you are going to pretend nothing happened. "There's a murder, let's go."

He stares blankly with his mouth open for a moment and then stammers, still a pitch too high, with slight panic, "I can't, I'm writing!"

You cross your arms. "With two knuckles broken on your right hand?"

He swears, "Your skills of observation win this round."

"Well if you weren't writing, what were you doing?" you ask, "Why didn't you answer your phone?" The corner of his mouth quirks up and he narrows his eyes.

"Worried about me, detective?"

"No."

"But you couldn't wait to get me onto the scene," he finishes.

"You're useful." You say. He sinks back into his chair smiling impishly now. "Couldn't stop thinking about me, huh?"

"No," you answer forcefully. He only smiles bigger. You can't help but smile yourself.

"How's your hand?" You ask as you turn to head back out.

"Painful," he says as he stands and grabs a jacket. Martha and Alexis have knowing smiles on their faces as you leave the apartment, and when the door finally swings closed behind you, it literally feels like the spot light cuts off and leaves you in the privacy of a dark stage once more. You take a deep breath without even realizing it. His head turns toward you,

"Something on you mind?" he asks; writer-senses make him as observant as a trained detective, but, thankfully, a little presumptive at the same time. When you nod, he takes a guess at what, "John Doe?"

You nod again, though you haven't thought of the man who can close your mother's case once and for all since you were called about this new case an hour ago. Still, it's a good excuse for your preoccupation, so you go with it. You learned early that the best way to lie to Castle was to let him tell the lie.

"Yeah, I went to the prison yesterday and asked him who hired him," you confide. He's the first person you've told, not counting Dad.

"Did he talk?"

You shake your head. He shrugs, adding in one of his matter-of-fact millionaire voices, "Doesn't mean he won't, after my guys on the inside give him a visit."

You snort as you exit the building, pivot on the toe of your left foot to face him, "You have guys on the inside?"

"Actually," he looks a little bit sheepish. "I was referring to Your Guys as My Guys."

You hold back a smile and roll your eyes. "Let's go."

**You Are Rick Castle**

You like that you've made her smile, even if she smothered it before it technically saw the light of day. You've always known you could never fall for a woman who doesn't smile, but you don't think of it like that. She _does_ smile; she just doesn't wear it for the world to see, and you've learned the expression on her face that mean she's hiding one. Like the one just now, as she rolls her eyes and quickly turns away. When you get a look at her face again, it's under complete control. Imagine being so guarded even a smile gets a full body check. There's just something really sexy about it that has you smiling.

But the moment you reach her car, you remember that this is work, not writing time, and not free time. You have a mild moment of panic as you look down the long barrel of a gun loaded with more moments like this—you off in la-la land thinking about her, when you should be thinking about the job—or even Nikki, since technically, your real job on a crime scene is to draw inspiration and write, not solve the crime like a real cop (but secretly, you've stopped crossing the yellow tape with that purpose in mind when Heat Wave was completed, about the time you really started to care.)

You gulp as she circles the car to get in the driver's side. You follow slowly. This is exactly why you can't date women you work with. It's what happened with Gina last month. It's what happened with Lizzie in the eleventh grade—you were co-editors for the school paper—and now, especially if you get what you want, it's going to happen here. She'll let you kiss her again, and you'll go on real dates, and you'll get your lines blurred. What is work? What is play? And in this line of business, that could get someone killed.

It doesn't even cross your mind that you don't _have_ to be on the job.

You fold yourself back up into a tiny square piece of notebook paper and then erect the castle walls that you named yourself after, the ones that help you be whoever you need to be—your secret behind writing such realistic characters—and this gets your head in the game. But things are off—weird, and it doesn't take long to place it. It's out of order. You aren't supposed to be in the car with Beckett; that comes later, after you've got a lead, after you've seen the body, after your cup of coffee.

"Right then," you say, getting down to business, "to the coffee house!"

She looks at you as if you've become a ghost, or a real mind reader. Her brown eyes are wide, "How did you know?"

"What?"

"The coffee house?"

You still aren't following. You say the only thing you can, "That's where I always get our coffee. It's just down the block."

"Oh," she looks forward, frowns as she contemplates the coincidence. "Well that's where they found the body."

_Ba Dah Da Na Na Nunh!_

**A/N: that is the Castle title shot music, if you can't figure it out. :-P **

**So, yeah, you're probably wondering why this doesn't seem to be finished. That's because it isn't. We know. We know. SHOCKING coming from writers who have a strict rule about not posting WIPs, but the simple fact of the matter is WE NEED YOUR HELP! We have never ever written mystery before. We would love to, but we don't have any cool Castle-worthy murders up our sleeves. **

**So if anyone can think of a weird way someone can be killed in a coffee shop. (Beckett likes the weird ones, so we want this one to be weird) then by all means, PLEASE leave your idea in a comment. We will pick what we like and see what we can do. We have some pretty cool character development things up our sleeves, but we want to mix it with plot. So if you want Rick and Kate to kiss some more—and do who-knows-what-else—then give us an interesting murder scene in a coffee shop!**


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